First Aid Agency / Coverage

Count coverage by hour, not by headcount

Fifteen trained people who all work Tuesdays is one shift of cover.

Coverage is recorded as a total and used as though it were availability. The useful question is different: for every hour the site is occupied, is there a trained person present and reachable, and how long would they take to arrive.

Mapping trained staff against the actual roster reliably finds gaps, and they cluster predictably: early mornings, evenings, weekends, school holidays, and whenever the one trained person on that shift takes leave.

Distance matters as much as presence. A trained responder at the far end of a large site, or on a different floor with lift access only, is several minutes away, and several minutes is the entire relevant window for the most serious events.

The remedy is usually redistribution rather than more training. Training the people who work the uncovered shifts, rather than the people who volunteer, changes coverage without changing the number.

Contractors, visitors and out-of-hours work are the recurring blind spot. A site with good coverage during business hours and a cleaning contractor working alone at ten at night has an arrangement that has never been examined.

There is a further coverage question that organisations rarely ask, which is whether the trained people are willing. Not everybody who holds a certificate wants to be the person who responds, and somebody who is reluctant will hesitate. Knowing who would actually step forward is different information from knowing who is qualified, and it is obtainable simply by asking.